The Blond Bombshell

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Madeleine Bunting had a thoughtful column in yesterday’s Guardian about the search for political ideas following the implosion of Reaganite deregulated liberalism.

She focusses on Philip Blond, a theology lecturer at the St Martin’s College, Lancaster who in addition to writing a book on Thomas Aquinas is also apparently “giving David Cameron advice on progressive Conservatism”. It was his ideas, she says, “which peppered Cameron’s speech at Davos” and which has, apparently, infuriated Simon Heffer, the infant Tory columnist, who was apparently “apoplectic with fury last week as he lambasted it as terrifying, meaningless, obtuse and infantile”.

Blond may provoke fury and incomprehension on the Tory blogs, but party thinkers such as Oliver Letwin and David Willetts are intrigued. As are the more thoughtful on the Labour backbenches such as Jon Cruddas. Close watchers on the left acknowledge that Blond is opening up ‘potent political territory’ – territory that could go to the Tories but equally could be captured by another, or even a new, party.

The key to understanding Blond’s thinking is that he is reviving a long-neglected tradition of English radical conservatism that goes back to William Cobbett and John Ruskin and which last flourished before the second world war in the thinking of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. If you are thinking that this kind of stuff can hardly be relevant to our current predicament, think again. From this tradition emerged a passionate attack on both the power of the state and the power of big business. Belloc's argument in The Servile State was that both capitalism and socialism enslaved the masses to their dictates.

Blond picks up these strands of conservative communitarianism and links them to two current critiques. The first is an attack on his own party’s hallowed faith in Thatcherite economics: it’s bust, argues Blond, and led to a form of monopoly capitalism which enriched only a tiny oligarchy. The second is an attack on the managerial technocratic welfare state which has destroyed the mutualism of the working class – and here, he owes much to Ferdinand Mount’s thoughtful Mind the Gap. Third, he attacks liberalism for promoting atomised individualism and moral relativism (which will go down very well with the Daily Mail constituency).

It sounds like a big bag of tricks, and it is; some new, some old, some borrowed, and only some blue.

Bunting goes on to remind her readers that dear old Belloc was an admirer of Mussolini, which brings a useful touch of historical perspective to all this. The lesson of history is that economic turmoil usually brings political and ideological change. The big political question for the industrialised world is whether the new political ideas are civilising or barbaric. Watching Gordon Brown & Co (and Brian Cowen in Ireland) floundering in the wake of the credit crunch one is struck by the thought: is this what the hapless politicians of the Weimar Republic looked like to their electorate? Incompetent, corrupt and out of date.

Footnote: Just realised that Blond studied at Peterhouse — a famous kindergarten for conservative thinkers.

Apple Store bans Facebook?

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Have you noticed how every Apple retail store is always packed with teenagers who are hogging all the demo machines? They’re obviously not going to buy Macs, so what are they doing? The answer is, apparently, FaceBooking. But,

In an effort to thwart off time-theft and loiterers, Apple has decided to add Facebook to the list of banned websites at retail locations nationwide. When I asked some of the genius’ today whether or not anyone noticed the change, they all said that Facebook stopped working sometime in the past week. One of the genius’ said “Apple Stores have become a regular Internet Cafe, so placing the most popular time-killer [Facebook] of them all on the banned-list will certainly help everyone get a chance to test out the computers”.

Source.

LATER: Dave Hill passes on a link which casts doubts on this:

Or is, just possibly, not true?

I know from experience that some Apple stores put limits on where on the Web you can take their demo machines — sometimes restricting Safari to Apple’s promotional pages.

And it’s certainly possible that individual stores have blocked Facebook — as MySpace has been blocked since May 2007 — because some of its members were hogging the machines.

Indeed, Ars Technica quotes an unnamed Apple employee who says his store has been blocking Facebook for about a month.

“It’s just trying to find a balance between letting people try out the computers, but not tying them up so others can try them as well,” he told Ars. (link)

But a person at Apple headquarters in a position to know assures me that there is no nationwide ban on Facebook in effect — permanent or otherwise.

I’m headed to the nearest Apple store to check it out. If you’re in one now, let us know in the comment stream where you are and whether the demo machine you’re using will let you get to your Facebook page.

UPDATE: CNET’s Caroline McCarthy beat me to it, did the legwork, and confirmed that Facebook is accessible at all three Manhattan Apple Stores, although as suspected there are individual machines in those stores that will redirect you to an Apple Store page.

What if Harry Markopolos had had a blog

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There are many extraordinary aspects of the Bernard Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scheme, but the strangest of all is that Madoff was rumbled 11 years ago by Harry Markopolos, an investor-turned-investigator who warned other investors that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. Mr Markopolos is a sharp operator — an experienced trader who saw right through the Madoff operation. But the really shocking thing is to discover that he presented his data and conclusions to the Boston office of the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 1999. I’ve just come on the document he presented then, and it makes astonishing reading. It’s detailed, informed and very closely argued. He highlights lots of what he calls ‘Red Flags’, any one of which ought to have triggered the regulator’s interest. And yet nothing happened.

In due course we will find out why. But in the meantime there’s been speculation that if Mr Markopolos had had a blog, then Madoff would have been stopped in his tracks much earlier — and a lot of investors might have been spared financial ruin. “Perhaps”, muses Ray Pellecchia on his blog, for example, “Mr. Markopolos lacked only an effective medium to communicate his warning.” He proposes a thought experiment: What would have happened if Mr. Markopolos had blogged his analysis? That is, what if he had posted the entire piece on a blog, under his name or a pseudonym?

“We’ll never know the answer, but here’s what I think might have followed:

• The post would have quickly spread far and wide among traders and investors. It’s a small Street, as the saying goes, and an analysis raising questions about the investment results of a prominent name such as Madoff would have sent e-mails flying.

• Those who had money invested with Mr. Madoff — or who were thinking of investing — would have done the same math that Mr. Markopolos had done, undoubtedly reaching the same conclusion. The resulting rush to pull money out and the avoidance of adding new money would have meant a faster end to the alleged Ponzi scheme.

• If indeed there were some fund managers who had invested with Madoff suspecting that something was amiss but going along for the lucrative ride, as Paul Kedrosky has suggested, they would have been forced to confront the newly unveiled facts. “

It’s a nice thought, but it ignores some harsh realities about corporate and legal life. To be fair, Mr Pellecchia acknowledges some of them.

“Would Mr. Madoff have initiated some sort of “retribution” against Mr. Markopolos, as the Journal says that Mr. Markopolos feared? Even an anonymous blogger can be identified. Again, it’s impossible to know. We do know that Mr. Madoff was chairman of Nasdaq, head of one of its largest market-making firms, and that he and others at his firm had advisory roles with regulators. Could Mr. Markopolos have been blackballed by the Street or subjected to greater regulatory scrutiny because he was taking on an industry leader? Mr. Markopolos also could have been sued for libel, and even if his analysis ultimately would have been proven factual and not libelous, defending a lawsuit is an expensive proposition. But it would seem unlikely that Mr. Madoff would risk exposing his alleged scheme by bringing a lawsuit. All in all, however, it’s easy to see how the possibility of regulatory retribution or a lawsuit would have had a chilling effect on a decision to go public. A whistle blower would need some wherewithal to blog his allegations.”

He certainly would. Just think about it for a moment. At the height of the Wall Street boom, when cretins like Madoff were worshipped as supermen by the media as well as by legislators and regulators, a guy publishes a blog post alleging that the Chairman of the Nasdaq is running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Before the poor schmuck can get out of bed the next morning, lawyers from a Wall Street law firm (@ $600+/hour) have had Google/Blogger take down the blog, have had his ISP disconnect him from the Net, and are threatening him with a lawsuit that will bankrupt not only him but everyone in his family unto the fourth generation.

So we need a dose of reality here. If you think the RIAA are nasty, then you’ve never seen real corporate thugs in action. I’ve been threatened twice with libel actions and, believe me, it ain’t funny. We live in a world in which all it takes to persuade an ISP to take down your site is a threatening letter from a lawyer. What Mr Pellecchia’s thought experiment highlights is that while the blogosphere is a great thing, it also has its limitations. There are times when only a big media organisation — a corporation like the BBC or a newspaper like the Guardian, New York Times or Washington Post — has the muscle and financial stamina to take on someone like Madoff in his prime.

Thanks to Hap for the link which started me off on this rant.

Twitter spam

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Recently my email inbox has been filling up with messages from Twitter saying the “xxx has requested to follow you on Twitter”. This was mysterious because (a) in most cases I didn’t know the people allegedly making these requests; and (b) my Twitter updates are ‘protected’ — i.e. visible only to those I’m allowing to follow me. The solution to puzzle (a) is that most of these ‘requests’ are from people who hope I will visit their websites in order to check on their identities — so the requests are, in a way, a form of spam. (And, as such, doomed to fail.) I’m still slightly puzzled by (b). I guess people discover I’m on Twitter by finding me on someone else’s followed/following list. So the trick is to pick a Twitter ‘hub’ like Stephen Fry or Rory Cellan-Jones and then ransack his list for spam targets.

Digital Domain – Why Television Still Shines

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Randall Stross thinks television is doing just fine as print media decline. “Television stands out”, he writes,

“as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our attachment to the medium, of course, is obscured by the splintering of our attention across so many cable offerings, in addition to the major networks.”

Hmmm… Note the reference to ‘splintering’. Broadcast TV — as distinct from narrowcast video — is a declining industry. I fear Professor Stross has missed the point of what’s going on. Just ask ITV.

Who’s Messing with Wikipedia?

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This diagram summarises the editing activity on the wikipedia page about Global Warming. I produced it by running the entry through an intriguing new web service described by Technology Review.

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia’s popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia’s most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as ‘controversial’ or warn that it ‘needs sources.’ But in practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia’s many million pages.

This is a great idea.

The sound of serious money

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This morning’s Observer column.

At this point, those of us who have been watching Mr Jobs strut his stuff for decades began to yawn. Then something happened that made your columnist sit up. On to the stage strode John Doerr, the driving force behind Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers of 2750 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California – the world’s premier venture capital firm. Mr Doerr said that he was so taken by this apps store idea that he was setting up a $100m fund to invest in people who were interested in developing software for the iPhone.

In retrospect, it may have been a pivotal moment in the history of the computing industry. Doerr, you see, has great judgment and a long history of spotting winners before anyone else. Companies he backed in their early days, for example, include Amazon, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Lotus, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems. So if he thought there was something in the apps store idea then perhaps Jobs’s hyperbole might be justified.

And so it has proved…